


i can't find you

by shineyma



Series: where'd you go [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 18:28:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8928313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: There's something wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [current drag me down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7059394) by [shineyma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma). 



> **Please note** : this is an AU that takes place in the same verse as [current drag me down](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7059394/chapters/16048108). In fact, you could kind of say it's an AU *of* the current drag me down verse. It takes place before it and will have no impact on the events of that fic; you can read this without reading that and read that without reading this. All they have in common is background. Cool?
> 
> I hope that's not too confusing! This is a might-have-been, an idea I had for how that verse might have gone before I settled on my eventual plan, and while I always intended to rework it into its own verse, I kind of like it within the framework of current drag me down. So.
> 
> I am finally caught up on comment replies! Go me!
> 
> Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review! And happy holidays! <3

“What are you doing here?”

Jemma startles, only just managing to hold back an embarrassing yelp, and spins to face the door. “Grant! Oh, you’re—”

“Fine,” he interrupts. His eyes drag over her, so intently searching she has to wonder if he thinks she’s an imposter. “Answer the question.”

 _Fine_ seems a stretch, but a split lip is hardly life threatening—and in any case, she hasn’t the right to push the issue—so she lets it go and presents the file folder she’s holding.

“I was just dropping off those feasibility reports you asked for,” she says, placing it with exaggerated care on the desk. He’s still looking at her so oddly; perhaps he thinks she was snooping around his office in his absence and is annoyed. “Should I come back later?”

Behind Grant, Markham, Warrington, Ortilla, Aldridge, and Hicks—his favored specialists—are filing into the office, presumably in anticipation of a debrief. Like Grant, they’re clearly just back from the field…although unlike him, they’re wearing tac gear.

She takes a closer look at the ill-fitting clothes he’s wearing—clothes that are certainly not what he left the base in this morning. They’re the same sort of generic, all-black fatigues the guards are outfitted in, and she can’t imagine what he’s doing in them.

Still, it’s not her place to ask.

“No,” Grant says, “stay. This’ll only take a minute.”

The specialists behind him exchange some strange looks.

“Uh, sir?” Hicks says almost delicately. “We were gonna hit that outpost this afternoon, remember? Before the new round of guards gets there?”

Impatience flits over Grant’s face, chased swiftly by a smile. “Right. Well, stick around anyway; I want to talk to you.”

Oh dear. That’s ominous.

“Should I…wait in the corridor?” she asks, moving tentatively towards the door. This morning he wouldn’t even tell her how long he’d be gone; if they’re about to discuss the op they’ve just returned from—or even the one they’re going on next—she wouldn’t think he’d want her to hear it.

“No,” he says shortly, and then turns to Warrington. “You were saying?”

If Warrington is at all thrown, she doesn’t show it. “Right. Repin cracked their encryption already. She’s combing through the files for references to off-site facilities the…artifact might be stored in.”

“Good.” Grant leans back against his desk. “And?”

Ortilla says something, Jemma thinks, but she’s shamefully distracted. Poorly fitting though the fatigues Grant’s wearing may be, they do nothing to detract from his appearance. The muscles in his arms are emphasized by the way he’s braced his hands against the desk behind him, and she’s mesmerized by their every flex.

It’s both sad and mortifying, she thinks, how easily she becomes transfixed by him.

“Fine,” Grant says. “We’ll revisit that later. About the outpost—”

Midsentence, he stops. Without warning, his attention zeroes in on her, and she takes a step back before she can help it. There’s something too much about his focus, something _sharp_ , and every better instinct she hasn’t yet managed to smother into silence is suddenly screaming for her to flee.

“Hey,” he says. “Come here.”

Jemma inches back another step. His eyes narrow.

“ _Jemma_.”

The tone halts her retreat, but it doesn’t do anything to drown out her screaming instincts. Grant makes an impatient gesture.

“ _Now_ ,” he says.

She tells her instincts to stuff it and creeps closer. Not that she _means_ to creep, it’s only that her feet are on her instincts’ side and would really rather be moving in the opposite direction. It takes a surprising amount of willpower to force herself to approach him.

Once she gets within range, he wraps a hand around the back of her neck and drags her into a kiss.

It’s harsh, and it must hurt him. She can taste the blood from his split lip; the copper tang of it makes her stomach shrivel and kicks her flight reflex back into high gear. But it’s _Grant_ and he’s _kissing_ her—and he interrupted his conversation to do it, prioritized this kiss over whatever else is going on—and her flight reflex stands no chance against that.

He’s never kissed her like this before, so demanding, so _present_ , and she takes it for as long as she can stand. Eventually, however, the burning in her lungs grows too severe to ignore; she tries to pull back and, when he doesn’t allow it, pushes him away.

 _That_ he allows, if only just. He gives her the space to breathe but retains his grip on her neck, keeping her face angled up at him so he can search her eyes for a long minute as his other hand curls over her hip. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but whatever he finds must please him, judging by his sudden smile.

“Miss me?” he asks.

His thumb sneaks its way to her bare skin, finds the hollow of her hip—perhaps his favorite of all her erogenous zones—and presses harshly into the bruise he left there yesterday. Pure, electric _want_ sweeps through her; there’s an answering and very demanding throb between her thighs, and Grant’s smile widens as she bites back a whimper.

It’s a very dark smile, though. Frightening.

“Yes,” she manages—goodness knows how.

“Good,” he says, squeezing her hip. Then he gives her a shove towards the couch against the wall. “Take a seat. Don’t go anywhere.”

Still breathless and a little dizzy (whether from lack of air or simply his attention), she stumbles, and Hicks steadies her without even looking. It’s a kind gesture, to be sure, but only serves to remind her that _all_ of Grant’s lieutenants just watched him kiss her silly.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, under the resumed conversation—and then, more than a little embarrassed, flees to the couch and sets about trying to turn herself invisible.

It doesn’t work, of course, but the room’s attention is on their planning, not on her. Since her relationship (or arrangement, really) with Grant began, she’s become accustomed to being ignored; she fades easily into the background, which is close enough to invisibility to let her embarrassment recede quickly.

Unlike the rest of the room, however, she can’t understand the conversation. Well, she _could_ , if she wanted to—she _is_ a genius, no matter that she’s taken on the role of resident pathetic, lovesick fool—but HYDRA’s more violent pursuits hold no interest for her. She prefers to remain blissfully ignorant about the number of people Grant slaughters on a regular basis, thank you very much.

But without the conversation to distract her, there are only thoughts of the kiss, and as her embarrassment eases she finds herself frowning. Being kissed with such passion was lovely, yes, but it was also unusual…as unusual as Grant paying her notice when there’s work to be done.

And, she notes, as unusual as the way he’s prowling around the office as Warrington speaks. Grant’s thoughts often manifest themselves in restless pacing, but that isn’t what this is. If she had to put a word to it, she’d say he’s _investigating_ the room. It’s almost as though…well, it’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s almost as though he’s never seen it before.

It’s an absurd thought, but once she has it, she can’t put it aside. She considers again the kiss, adds it to his insistence that she stay, her strange reaction to him (it’s been _months_ since she was truly, properly frightened of him, and yet…), and the way he’s studying the shelves behind his desk, and is suddenly somehow positive: there’s something wrong with him.

She looks instinctively to Markham and finds him already watching her. He gives her a grim nod that both frightens and comforts her—frightens because there’s _something wrong_ , but comforts because she’s not the only one who’s noticed. Markham is Grant’s second; he has power in HYDRA, and whatever is wrong with Grant, chances are it will be easier to fix with his help.

But Jemma isn’t the only one who’s reached a conclusion; the conversation is over, and they've clearly agreed upon some course of action regarding the outpost.

“Right,” Grant says, “let’s go.”

“Oh, but,” Jemma begins without thought, only for her voice to fail her under Grant’s gaze.

“Something wrong, baby?” he prompts.

The endearment comes as a cold shock to her system. It puts ice in her veins and only cements her certainty that something is very, very wrong, because Grant doesn’t patiently accept interruptions while he’s working and he _definitely_ doesn’t call her baby. That’s not the sort of relationship they have.

But the same screaming instincts that made it so difficult to approach him earlier keep her from asking outright what’s happened. Even his mildly expectant expression is somehow terrifying; she doesn’t want to see him moved to anger.

“I’m sorry,” she says to buy time as her mind races. Fortunately, she hits on a decent excuse right away. “I was only going to ask whether you mightn’t want to change your clothes? Before you go anywhere, that is.”

Grant looks down at himself and fingers the hem of his ill-fitting shirt, blinking in something like surprise.

“Right,” he says. “Good idea.”

“And the hard copy of those blueprints is in your quarters anyway, right?” Hicks asks. “We should grab it just in case.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Grant agrees, and motions to the door. “After you.”

That’s not right, either. Grant doesn’t invite his subordinates to precede him out of a room; Grant walks away without warning and expects everyone else to follow. Yet he shows every sign of being serious, and waits until Hicks has gone before him to leave the office.

A certain tension seems to depart the room with him. Jemma exhales slowly and looks again to Markham.

“What _happened_ on that op?” she asks him, not entirely evenly.

“Good question,” he says as he lifts his phone to his ear. “Repin? Director’s office. Now.”

Repin arrives quickly and works even faster; in no time at all, she’s set herself up at Grant’s desk and pulled up archived security footage from the facility Grant apparently led an attack on this morning.

“We split up around 0930,” Markham tells Repin. He’s leaning over her shoulder, one hand braced on her seat back, and either doesn’t notice or coolly ignores the aggravated look she shoots him at the invasion of her space. “Ward’s comm went offline at 10:23 and we ran into him on the second floor at 10:39. Whatever happened, it happened then.”

“Right.” Repin taps at her laptop, presumably fast-forwarding to the appropriate time. “Okay, I’ve got him at 10:15, going into this storage room…and here’s the storage room.”

Jemma chews on her lip as the others gather around the laptop to watch the footage. She can’t see the screen from the couch, but she doesn’t dare move closer for fear of being remembered and kicked out. Her feelings for Grant are completely one-sided; as far as his people are concerned, she’s just the woman (or perhaps _a_ woman, but she tries not to dwell on that possibility) he’s sleeping with. She has no place in a gathering of his most trusted.

But there’s something wrong with Grant, and if she’s going to fix it, she needs to know what. So she remains still and hopes one of the others will be moved to narrate the footage.

Unsurprisingly, they aren’t. For several moments they watch in silence, faces grim. At one point Ortilla mutters something in what she believes is Spanish, but the only response is an annoyed nod from Aldridge, so hopefully it isn’t relevant.

Then, all at once:

“What the _fuck_?!”

“That’s new.”

“Crap.”

Their reactions—though sudden enough to nearly startle Jemma out of her skin—are actually somewhat encouraging. Whatever happened to Grant, there must be physical evidence of it on the security footage, in which case they’ll have a starting point on fixing him.

Now, how to get a look at it herself?

She’s barely begun considering her options, however, when Markham surprises her. “Dr. Simmons? You wanna take a look at this?”

“Of course,” she says automatically. Unexpected though the offer is, she’s not about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth, and wastes no time in joining them at the desk.

As Ortilla and Warrington move apart to make room for her, she’s briefly distracted by the bloody bandage peeking out from under Warrington’s sleeve. Then Repin replays the footage and she forgets everything else.

In the footage, Grant enters and does a quick sweep of the storage room. Nostalgia tugs at her heartstrings—one thing that hasn’t changed since their days on the Bus is his room clearing technique—but it loses out to worry soon enough.

Once assured he’s alone, he wanders through the storage room for a few minutes, carefully examining each box. His focus might be relevant…or it might not.

“Was he looking for something?”

“Intel pointed to the base as a possible location for an artifact the Director’s interested in,” Markham answers. His tone, though polite, discourages further question, so Jemma simply nods.

On screen, Grant pauses at the end of an aisle. He turns slightly, gun starting to come up—and then, between one blink and the next, he’s on the floor.

And he’s not wearing his tac gear.

“What—?”

“No sign of tampering,” Repin says as Jemma gapes, “no skip on the time stamp, and no indication anyone else has accessed this footage.”

The words serve as a jumpstart, knocking her out of her shock; her mind races, drawing up and discarding multiple theories in the span of a single heartbeat. She was anticipating some manner of outside influence, considering Grant’s odd behavior, but the change of clothes—

Wait. _Wait_.

“Can you zoom in?” she asks Repin. Around her, the specialists come to attention.

“Not a lot.” Repin frowns. “It’s a crappy security camera; get in too close and all you’re gonna get is big grey pixels.”

“Get as close as you can on what he’s wearing, please.”

“Sure.”

As Repin complies, Ortilla leans in close, squinting at the screen as though he can pick up on Jemma’s line of thought simply by looking. Repin twitches but otherwise ignores him.

Warrington, eminently more sensible, takes the more expedient route of asking. “You see something, Dr. Simmons?”

“Something familiar,” she says, eyes searching the still for any sign she’s mistaken. “Those scrubs—”

“Not a great look,” Aldridge says lightly. “It’s a crime to put a man that hot in something so shapeless.”

“Now Candice, what has the Director said about calling him hot?” Ortilla chides, straightening.

“That he takes it as a threat from me and I’d better watch it before he reassigns me to Antarctica.” Aldridge beams. “But the Director’s not here.”

“Focus,” Markham says. It’s quiet and even, not truly an admonishment, but is enough to bring what little tension that had begun to ease rushing back. “Dr. Simmons, you were saying?”

Jemma bites the inside of her cheek. How can she be certain? The footage is in black and white and Repin’s hardly been able to enhance it at all; there’s every possibility those are simply generic, ordinary scrubs.

But if they aren’t…

“How much do you know about Grant’s imprisonment by SHIELD?” she asks.

In return, she gets five very long stares.

“Starting with its existence?” Ortilla asks eventually. “Not a damn thing.”

Ah. “Perhaps I shouldn’t…”

“Yes,” Warrington says, “you should.”

Well, if Grant didn’t want them to know, she’s already said too much. In for a penny…

“Grant was captured by SHIELD shortly after the uprising,” she says. “However, rather than being handed over to the military, as the majority of prisoners were, he was kept in a cell beneath SHIELD’s new headquarters.”

“Okay,” Aldridge says. “And what does that have to do with anything?”

“After he proved that he could make a weapon from a pair of jeans, we dressed him in scrubs just like those.”

She doesn’t realize what she’s said until Warrington pins her with an assessing look. “‘We’?”

Oh dear.

“I was with SHIELD at the time,” she says casually, hoping to brazen it out. There are, after all, much greater issues at hand. “In any case, I can’t say with any certainty they’re the same scrubs, but they’re definitely not what he was wearing when he walked in.”

“No,” Markham agrees. He alone looks unmoved by her slip; perhaps he already knew of her previous loyalties. “And when I ran into him, he was wearing a guard’s uniform. Said his gear got trashed in a fight and it was too damn cold to go without.”

Repin hits play on the footage without being asked, and they watch in silence as Grant ambushes a guard, knocks him out—after a brief fight; they’ve discovered the origin of his split lip, it seems—and steals his uniform.

“Fights like Ward,” Warrington comments, eyes narrowed. “Mostly.”

“Looks like him, too,” Ortilla says. “But he sure as hell doesn’t act like him.”

“Pretty sure he had Hicks lead him out ’cause he didn’t know where to go,” is Aldridge’s contribution. “And he didn’t call any of us by name. He doesn’t know what Ward knows.”

“Well,” Jemma starts, and then bites her tongue. The fact that he immediately sought out one of her erogenous zones is _not_ something she wants to announce to this gathering of effective strangers. Besides, knowledge aside, it was certainly a strange move; he _never_ prioritizes her over his work.

Fortunately, none of the others seem to wonder over her false start.

“That’s right,” Aldridge realizes. “He called you Jemma, didn’t he? So much for that theory.”

“Except he’s known you longer,” Markham says slowly. “Since before he was in SHIELD custody.”

It’s not a question, but Jemma nods anyway to prompt him along.

“Wait,” Ortilla says. “Man, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Maybe I am,” Markham says.

Warrington shakes her head, Aldridge gives a low whistle, and Jemma looks between the four of them in utter confusion. That Repin appears just as lost as she is cold comfort.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“Time travel,” Aldridge says, tone nearly reverent.

“Is it even possible?” Warrington asks.

The question is very clearly aimed at Jemma. She shrugs.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” she allows—honestly, after everything she saw during her time on the Bus, to say nothing of what she’s seen _since_ , there isn’t much she would—“but if Grant somehow traveled forward from his time in the Vault, I wouldn’t expect him to greet me with a kiss.”

Honestly, she wouldn’t expect him to greet her with a kiss if he traveled forward from _yesterday_. Just the thought makes her feel raw, so she chooses not to voice it.

“Perhaps _dimensional_ travel?” she theorizes. It’s something of a leap, but even wild guessing is better than nothing. “If Grant somehow…switched places with a double from an alternate universe…a universe in which we were on good terms when he was captured by SHIELD and he hadn’t managed to escape yet…”

It would explain his greeting, at least, and the scrubs. It might even explain his frightening intensity; if he went _into_ Vault D at the same time her Grant did, it’s been years since he had any kind of contact with anyone. And if he’s on intimate terms with his Jemma…well, little wonder he should be eager to renew their acquaintance after such a long imprisonment.

“Whichever it is,” Markham says, “how do we get our version back?”

That…is a very good question.

“Before we can reverse the switch—” (assuming there was a switch at all and they’re not on entirely the wrong track, she doesn’t add) “—we need to know how it came about. Repin, can you go back to right before it happened? When he stopped at the aisle?”

“Sure,” Repin says, and does so.

“I presume you would have mentioned by now if the artifact he was looking for involved breaching dimensional barriers,” Jemma says. It gets her a wry sort of half-smile from Markham. “And I respect your desire to keep Grant’s secrets. But tell me, was it an alien artifact he was looking for? Broadly, is it possible there were alien artifacts being stored in that room?”

After a barely perceptible beat of hesitation, Markham nods. “The artifact is Asgardian.”

“Oh, that’s not good,” she says, turning swiftly to examine the screen. “Grant has _terrible_ luck with Asgardian things.”

There are no berserker staffs or evil mind-controlling women immediately apparent in the frame Repin’s paused on, but after a second or two, Warrington makes a quiet noise.

“There,” she says, pointing to the corner of the screen. “That box is glowing.”

The box in question is on the bottom shelf, only just visible in the camera’s limited sight.

“Rewind the footage, please,” Jemma requests.

Doing so proves that the box wasn’t always glowing; in fact, it started just as Grant passed it.

“You think that’s what did it?” Ortilla asks.

“It’s certainly the most likely candidate,” she says. “But with so little to go on, it’s impossible to say for sure.” She looks hopefully to Markham. “I don’t suppose you happened to bring that box back with you?”

In answer, Markham only sighs.

“We gonna take the base again?” Aldridge asks, oddly eager.

“Yeah.” He looks at the stilled image of Grant for a long moment, then gives Warrington a nod. “Take one of these clowns and a section of grunts. Clear out the storage room…actually, make it the whole base, just to be safe.”

“Sir,” Warrington says, and then jerks her chin at Ortilla. “You’re with me.”

“Awwwwww, come on,” Aldridge starts, only to be silenced by a look from Markham. “Oh, fine. What do you need me for?”

“Distraction,” he says succinctly. “Ward’ll be back soon, and whatever the issue is, he has to know we’ll pick up on any weird behavior. He’ll do whatever he can to keep us from noticing, and that could get messy fast. Keep him focused on you and not worried on acting the part.”

“Got it,” Aldridge says.

The conversation continues from there, but as it’s all specialist strategy, Jemma tunes it out in favor of Repin.

“Have you accessed the base’s files?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Repin says. “Nothing useful. There’s an inventory list for that storage room, but it’s all blacked out. Note says to see the physical file.”

It’s about what she expected—Repin wouldn’t have just sat here in silence if she had found anything that might help—but it’s still disappointing. Jemma can go through files, can dig into official reports and read between the carefully worded lines to find oddities beneath. She _can’t_ storm a base.

With a base to be stormed and no files to be read, she has nothing to contribute here. She’s useless. There’s nothing she can do but wait.

Wait and worry, that is.

If the Grant who returned from the mission _has_ come here from an alternate universe, it stands to reason that _her_ Grant—the Grant who belongs here—is now in the universe his double left. And if that double was last in Vault D…

She doesn’t know how he’ll respond to finding himself back in the Playground’s basement. (For that matter, she doesn’t know how the _team_ will respond to finding themselves with a different Grant.) But she _does_ know that he’s very well armed…and that the last time he was in Vault D, he tried to kill himself three times.

It was a play. He’s told her so himself. Yet she’s always thought there was more truth in the attempts than he wanted to admit; after all, isn’t there something telling about the level of desperation it would take to drive him to risking death to escape?

To end up right back where he started after everything he’s been through since…

Chilled by the thought, she hugs herself and turns away from Grant’s desk. There are no real distractions to be had here; she won’t do herself any favors letting her mind wander down such paths.

“I should get back to my lab,” she says, interrupting Markham midsentence. If he’s annoyed, he hides it well. “When you’ve retrieved that box…”

“We’ll send someone for you,” he says, anticipating the request she can’t quite bring herself to voice. “Thank you, Dr. Simmons.”

Effectively dismissed, she flees the office. Thoughts of Grant in Vault D—the _first_ time, the weak way his hand fisted in her shirt as she saved his life, how he grew pale and strange as the months drew on—chase her out.


End file.
